Nothing is Real

After the highways and the ascent through zig zag roads, a city pops up in the mountains, evenveloped in fog, unfolding right before your eyes. The afternoon sky bursts with colors gleaming on the greens of the mountains until it cools down to the early evening's grey. It's like a visual equivalent of a Sigur Ros song.  We close in and see houses, gas stations, pasalubong stores and the rest of a bustling city sprawled in a row of hills. Baguio is an urban dwelling among the clouds, the traffic heavily congested in some parts but the strawberry fields close by.

Nothing is real, it sings to you.

IN MEMORY OF BUGGERS

This city is capable of building the strongest connections in your psyche. These mountains hold and mold some of the firmest memories. It’s a collective childhood recollection:  getting dizzy at the zig-zag roads, bike or boat rides at Burnham Park, posing with the Igorots in Minesview, pine trees, jars of Good Shepherd ube or strawberry jam and sundot-kulangkot.

When I was a kid travelling up here, my father drove us himself. It must have been lot more difficult to navigate, let alone drive these roads back then. My mother being my mother, all three of us (I think even my cousin) were all in matching yellow Camp John Hay vests.

This is where you take those pictures.

You spend a good part of your life wanting to be the kid in those pictures again. Repetition longs and desires itself.

FARM-TO-MOUTH STRAWBERRIES

This trip was also the Panay crowd's annual meet and H.'s 32nd, Baguio-style. The couples with kids stayed in hotels, while the rest camped in F.'s place. Only a few years back, D. & I were drunken-ice-skating with F., having vodka jellies at 8 am, among other fond memories. Nowadays, we do wholesome cookouts, play Monopoly, and finish the drinking before 1am while the kids are in another room playing Nintendo Wii.

We had dinner the first night at a Japanese place called Chaya, a house-turned-restaurant where the tables were few and the kitchen was open and literally homey. The floors and high ceilings were wooden. There's a fireplace, a huge couch, and a piano. The chef-owner was Japanese and you find a curious warmth in a place that served complimentary green tea ice cream.

After touring the BenCab museum the following day, we had lunch at the museum's cafe. All the rice meals had the organic mountain-grown brown rice of Cafe Sabel, paired perfectly with cucumber coolers or lemongrass iced tea.

On the third day, we had lunch at Le Chef at the Manor in John Hay. "A Christmas tree place." P. called it. It’s December, and their Christmas tree was a real pine tree. Their garden had a playground where I.  insisted on playing in his make-believe train for over an hour.

Little P. and our little I. picked strawberries at the La Trinidad Farm in Benguet and we'd like to think this is the trip's highlight. We rinsed them with water from our bottles and ate them literally on the fields where they grew, so they were farm-to-mouth. We all had strawberry taho - the pang-instagram taho, as the slick taho vendor in sunglasses dubbed it, encouraging us to hashtag and become a follower.  

THE SEARCH ONLY APPEARS COMPLICATED

It took me sixteen years to climb up here again. The last time was when a National Convention sponsored us (the geekiest boys and girls) up here for 5 days. I formed part of the school Debate Team (led by H.) that made it to the finals. All of us were no taller than 5”5. How cute it was – an exclusive-for-boys Catholic school with a rowdy reputation versus an exclusive-for-girls Catholic school mostly from upper middle class families who were reputed to be smarter than us. All the young ladies of their debate team probably stood taller than 5”5. We debated the abolition of pork barrel in Congress and our school’s team won, mostly because of H. ‘s arguments and pre-conceived counter-arguments that we all rehearsed.

On the day we won the debate, among the audience were three other classmates who became my friends for life. Also among the audience was a young lady who was voted to be the convention’s National Vice President (the popular and intellectual equivalent of second head cheerleader), whom I married 13 years later. 

Here we all are, again, now. H. is completing his Ph.D in Berkeley. B., who won the convention presidency at the time, has been shuffling back and forth Manila, Melbourne, and South America with his Canadian astronomer-wife. We did not speak of it, but we are celebrating so many other wins as we sipped coffee sweetened by muscovado in the old Café by the Ruins. What we did speak of, was the weather and the wine in Santiago, Chile, triathlons in Melbourne, and a Filipino and his Canadian wife’s search for Argentina Corned Beef in Argentina.

I shared that I heard a story about a friend of a friend who looked for The French Baker in France. 

HIGH-ALTITUDE RUNNER'S HIGH

If we lived here, my favorite thing would be how the weather makes running outdoors conducive at any time of day. The towering trees, the clean pine scent (or the pollution) and just spotting a interesting-enough place for lunch or dinner during your run makes the uphill dares worth taking. Drunk the previous night, M. and I decided to head out for a run at 10am, but it still felt like running at 6am. 

We decided to follow the running route of Manny Pacquao, except that I imagined it to be in Lake Drive, while M. thought it was up in Camp John Hay. We lost track of each other somewhere around Session Road. So we were on separate paths, but must have felt the strange, laughable relief in knowing that we both got a little lost. I ran 5.5 km at a slower than usual pace, having to walk or stop at the crowded sidewalks. As I lost my way I discovered how so much of Baguio has also deteriorated, has been overcrowded and polluted.  But nevertheless, it’s a path you’d want to run again. 

On the way back, I saw M. a couple of meters away from the hotel. Inevitably, We head out at the same time, we both get lost, and he was right there exactly at the time to go home.